Department Planning

The DepartmentView app written in R Shiny provides a modular approach to visualizing course schedules, but also helps highlight course overlap, shows distribution of courses across fields/levels that enables a holistic view of departmental offering, and facilitates planning. Furthermore, the tool enables dynamic updating such that all faculty can see up to date schedules across the Department. The proposed system generates high quality visual reporting, consolidates an existing data workflow at a Department level, and is amenable to improvement by any number of undergraduate and graduate students learning R.

The app comprises two parts: a Google Spreadsheet with information about all planned classes and web-based visualizations from that data. The spreadsheet intends to replace the far outdated method of data collection through emailing around Microsoft Word documents, and can also be pulled into the Shiny app such that the data can be easily visualized. Below are various visualizations created through the app. The top right image–the schedule overlap map–offers a way to easily view and change the availability of department classes. Classes can be broken down by topic, faculty member, and course type, or some combination of these, and also includes features to track these changes by year.

Graduate Student Progress

The new DGSViewer app, written by Dahee Lee, Professor Dustin Tingley, and Thom Wall is an open source R Shiny app made to record and visualize data relating to the graduate student experience in the Department of Government. The app is able to run on FERPA compliant level 3 security systems and requires a Harvard Key to access. Through the app, one can easily get in depth individual data about a student’s progress or get aggregate data about the department as a whole. Faculty can track the courses taken, progress made on dissertations, comments from other faculty, and the post-graduation professional lives of their students with this app.

Curriculum Mapping

Government Department Curriculum Mapping Prototype is a project headed by Professor Dustin Tingley with help from a host of government graduate and undergraduate students. This project was initiated by the Harvard Department of Government to start a process and conversation about their curriculum. Undergraduate RAs went through all 187 Government Department and cross-listed classes to find either an explicit or implicit learning objective in their syllabi. Professor Tingley collected de-identified data on the course choices of all 11,931 students who had enrolled in a Government Department course since 2002.

Professor Tingley and the graduate students created an R Shiny app (found here) that allows for various data visualizations. The four tabs in the app allow the user to select and easily interpret course popularity amongst Government concentrators and non-concentrators over time, course enrollments, and various aspects of course comparison. The Network Data module visualizes how students move through the Government curriculum and which courses tend to be taken together.

The learning objectives module analyzes the frequency of words in the course “learning objective” descriptions. This tab offers various ways to analyze the text descriptions of the learning objectives to identify courses with similar objectives.

This app seamlessly integrates Government Department data from the last 14 years, allowing users with no statistics or coding background to easily uncover important insights about trends and patterns within the department.